When will we see the results of microbiome research in our every day lives? And what will that look like?

Rob Knight joins us for the first time today. He’s a professor at UC San Diego and Director of the Center for Microbiome Innovation. He is well known for co-authoring a paper showing that the microbial populations in the guts of obese mice differentiate from those in lean mice.

In addition to studies on obesity, Rob is also interested in the connections of the gut micriobiome with brain disorders, the possibilities for fecal transplants, and also the impact of microbial communities on drug interactions.

On the tools side we hear a lot about the success of single cell sequencing for human genetics; what impact are these new tools having on metagenomics? And if consent is often a thorny issue for studies in humans, what are the ethical issues studying microbes?

Rob says that in the next five to ten years we will be “taking control over our microbiomes,” meaning that we will be able to measure our microbial communities and use this information to improve our diet or to optimize a therapeutic. The big piece missing for translating microbiome research, he says, is better user interface or apps that would abstract away all the technical information. We need to go from the world of GPS coordinates to using Google Maps, he says.